Wade through all the jargon and word salad in the new 12-page mission statement and you might think you’d stumbled across a Green Party manifesto or a blog by Greta Thunberg.
It talks of ‘proudly cross-cutting strategic ambitions of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Climate Action’. There is a lot about ‘justice’ – climate, racial, social and economic justice, that is.
Yet this is a document issued by a 700-year-old City of London charity with a very specific role: to maintain all the Square Mile’s non-rail bridges over the River Thames. These include one of Britain’s most famous landmarks, Tower Bridge. And, because it has £1.5 billion in the bank, the charity does all this at zero cost to the taxpayer.
Not that the current board members at the City Bridge Foundation seem terribly interested in helping Londoners cross the river. The word ‘Thames’, in fact, appears just once in its new policy document, titled Standing With Londoners. Of much greater importance is its mission to ‘strengthen our role as a social-justice funder’ for the benefit of ‘all Londoners’.
Many of us, however, might argue that what would really help ‘all Londoners’, rather than selected charities and Left-leaning pressure groups, would be for the charity to use its huge treasure chest to do its job.
Last night, one London Tory MP accused the foundation of ‘woke nonsense’.
Whopping grants to outfits such as Spectra CIC (£1 million to help it ‘build capacity in the trans and sex-worker sector’) or Race On The Agenda (£1.5 million to ‘combat racial injustice’), may assist a subset of London life. But is it too much to ask a charity set up to maintain bridges to, well, maintain a few more bridges?
Robert Hardman on Hammersmith Bridge, which remains closed to all traffic except for bicycles and pedestrians after six years
A charity protecting some of London’s most iconic bridges, the City Bridge Foundation, awarded over £1.1million to an organisation allegedly linked to Hamas
The whole of London has become a global laughing stock thanks to the farce that is Hammersmith Bridge. ‘London’s bridges really are falling down,’ crowed The New York Times in 2020, mocking the fact Britain was incapable of basic repairs to a key artery and elegant Victorian landmark (which features in the last Bond film).
Yet, six years on, it’s still closed to traffic. Other bridges are also in a dismal state, not least Albert (closed for a year) and Waterloo (which could be heading the way of Hammersmith). So, might the fabulously well-upholstered City Bridge Foundation lend a hand?
No, it says firmly, it cannot. The foundation’s official position is that its primary purpose is to maintain the five City bridges in its care. Beyond that, it explains, its ‘ancillary’ role is to make grants to charities that help people across Greater London. However, that is actually a role it designed for itself back in 1995, when it applied to the Charity Commission to change its own rules. Therefore there is nothing to stop it from applying to change them again.
This all raises broader questions. Whose money is it anyway? And who voted for this stuff? The cash belongs to the people of London, whose antecedents paid all those tolls to cross the river. And over centuries the fund has grown into a vast investment portfolio.
The City Bridge Foundation actually has just one overarching trustee, namely the City of London Corporation which, in turn, appoints the board members who appoint the committee that doles out all the money.
For years, the Left have painted the City as the ultimate bastion of pinstriped capitalist fat-cattery.
Yet it would appear a new mindset has slowly permeated the Square Mile, raising the intriguing question: has the City gone woke? How else to explain that a City charity, which had been diligently maintaining a safe route over the Thames since the days of Dick Whittington, just handed £1.2 million to an organisation with alleged links to terrorist outfit Hamas?
It is all thanks to a bunch of far-sighted medieval monks and merchants that the entity then known as Bridge House Estates was founded in the 12th century with the purpose of traversing the river.
They started with a new London Bridge, built in stone to replace the old wooden one, and charged a toll.
They reinvested those tolls so efficiently they went on to build two more, Blackfriars and Tower Bridges – and now manage two more, Southwark and the Millennium (formerly ‘Wobbly’) Bridge. And with so much money at their disposal after nearly eight centuries of careful stewardship, the City elders took a big decision in 1995.
They decided they could branch out from the boring, day-to-day civil engineering stuff and start donating some of the spare cash to good causes.
Since when, as the rebranded City Bridge Foundation, they have quietly given away £840 million to hundreds of charities, some very deserving, some less so, some overtly political and some with no obvious connection to the City.
Last week, The Times revealed that two cheques amounting to a whopping £1.2 million had been handed to an organisation called the Muslim Charities Forum. Its treasurer just happens to be chief executive of another foundation, Al-Khair, which is alleged to have connections to Hamas. The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into Al-Khair after one of its associates was arrested in the UK and charged by the US with allegedly providing ‘material support’ to Hamas.
Critics have argued funds should be put towards protecting other bridges in the capital owned by local authorities or TfL (Pictured: Hammersmith Bridge)
No one is suggesting the City Bridge Foundation had any idea of a possible Hamas link. However, it all adds to the impression of an organisation with more money than it knows what to do with.
As well as appointing its own poet in residence, for example, it pays each one of its 29 staff more than £60,000 a year.
The revelation about the Muslim Charities Forum surfaced in detailed research undertaken by Looking For Growth, a pro-business campaign group.
One of its priorities for London is to break the bureaucratic logjam that has closed Hammersmith Bridge because two councils and the Mayor of London cannot work out a way of reopening it. The knock-on effect across west London’s other bridges and the impact on business has been severe.
Looking For Growth took a deep dive into the City Bridge Foundation and its finances. It was astonished to find that the charity was not simply just giving handouts to conventional charities – from Age UK to Mencap – but big sums to lobbying groups and activists.
‘Hammersmith Bridge has been shut since 2019, but the City Bridge Foundation’s rules stop them from being able to step in and fix it,’ says Dr Lawrence Newport, chief executive of Looking For Growth.
‘Instead of using its money to fund social justice causes – including a group campaigning against a new river crossing – the City of London Corporation must change the Foundation’s rules to get it back to its original purpose.’
Within the City Bridge Foundation there is dismay that this low-profile, ancient body is suddenly under attack for its philanthropy. Speaking to some of those on the inside, I find incredulity that they should be expected to fund bridges other than their own.
One senior figure, not unreasonably, asks why a well-run charity, which has been carefully managing its funds for centuries, should pay out hundreds of millions because the halfwits running 21st century local authorities have been so inept.
We can all sympathise with that argument. Yet this is a charity that has paid out £840 million to do plenty of other things that are the responsibility of the state – whether fighting racial injustice or looking after elderly people.
Furthermore, Looking For Growth points out that the charity has been paying millions to organisations with clear political agendas. Why is a body in charge of bridges giving £5 million to the Esme Fairbairn Foundation to ‘tackle the causes of deep-rooted structural injustices facing people in towns and cities across the UK’?
Hammersmith Bridge is caught in a bureaucratic logjam between the two councils that it links and the Mayor of London (pictured: Robert Hardman at the bridge)
Established 65 years ago, the Esme Fairbairn Foundation has a long track record of good deeds, but also support for controversial single-issue causes such as pro- immigration outfit Right To Remain or the Media Standards Trust, precursor to the anti-Press group Hacked Off.
With more than £800 million of its own in the bank, does Esme Fairbairn really need another £5 million, which might otherwise be spent on bridge-building?
The foundation also commissioned a deep-dive into its connections with the slave trade. It would, no doubt, have cheerfully handed millions to the reparations crowd were it not for the frustrating discovery that it had next to nothing to do with slavery. That’s the problem with a charity that predates slavery, I suppose.
The City Bridge Foundation might cling to rules of its own making and insist it can only maintain ancient City bridges. But it circumvented those rules to take on the Millennium Bridge in 2003. And, if it is happy to spread its largesse far beyond the Square Mile, why can’t it help bridges beyond the City, too?
In response to questions from The Mail on Sunday, a spokesman for City Bridge Foundation said: ‘Our first responsibility is the maintenance of five Thames bridges at no cost to the taxpayer. Only funds not required for the bridges are available for our charitable work supporting Londoners.’
As for the possible Hamas connection: ‘Our grant was specifically made to Muslim Charities Forum for its work in London.
‘Every grant application is subject to robust checks and ongoing monitoring.’
There remains zero enthusiasm for helping any other Thames crossings. ‘Our five bridges are open, safe and in good condition. London’s other bridges are the responsibility of other organisations, which we work with through other industry groups.’
Pressure for change is not going to go away, though.
‘Our bridges have been left to wrack and ruin, making it more difficult to get around and leaving Londoners more divided,’ says Tory MP and Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp.
‘We are being sold down the river by this Left-wing pressure group masquerading as a charity,’ the MP for Croydon South adds.
‘They should spend less time and money on divisive campaigning and more time building bridges.’
He urged a clean sweep of the board ‘so this charity can return to its purpose of improving London’s infrastructure – like Hammersmith Bridge – instead of wasting money on woke nonsense that actually undermines our society.’
That view is echoed by urban analysts, such as Ike Ijeh, head of housing, architecture and urban space at the leading think-tank Policy Exchange. ‘At a time when London’s bridges are increasingly in need of urgent repair, the City Bridge Foundation should be reminded that its vast revenues are not its inheritance but Londoners’,’ he said.
‘And it is high time that inheritance was used to the strategic benefit of the majority of Londoners and not to line the coffers of the social justice identity complex that all too often divides London.’
Ultimately, here is a classic case for students of what academics call ‘groupthink’.
Just look again at the foundation’s website. The board and the funding committee are full of professionals keen to trumpet their City credentials and charity experience. However, out of the 15 people responsible for an organisation that builds and mends bridges, I count just two engineers.
Additional reporting by Nicholas Pyke
